Second Hand News
by The Sadie B
Summary: It is often advised that you shouldn't trust guys who you are 95% sure are serial killers. Someone sure as hell should have told Ellie Robinson that.


**Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural**.

* * *

The corridors were quiet. Which was to be expected, it was about 4 o'clock at night.

God he was bored. Same thing every night, you'd be sick of it too. He'd honestly been a little freaked out by the place when he'd started there, but you got used to it.

It was the sheer size of Grangewood Manor, to be telling the truth. The parts of what was now a museum dedicated to the Grangewood family's history and the Salem Witch Trials, that weren't open to the public, were ridiculously easy to get lost in. That is, if you didn't know your way around.

But of course Billy Wood did. He would have been the night guard at the place for a decade in September. Didn't make watching security cameras for hours any less boring. Less than two hours to go, then he could go home. Till then, he had to keep watching the security monitors, not like anything ever happened. The things were shit and were really just a formality.

Wow, it was getting really hard to keep his eyes open. Maybe if he closed them for ten minutes, who was gonna rat him out? He was the only one there after all. Rodger was working the daytime hours that week. He yawned. Ten minutes wouldn't hurt.

The buzz of static woke him up with a start. A security monitor that linked up to the camera in the basement was the source. He smacked the side of the monitor. Damn thing was on its last leg. The picture didn't improve. It kept flashing in and out. He was gonna have to go down there and deal with it. Great.

* * *

The basement was strictly staff-only. Anything not on exhibit, or still being catalouged or authenticated was down in there somewhere. Really only Dr. Rosen and his assistant spent any extended period of time down there.

The security-camera was on the other side of the room. And it was a huge room. So he had better get this over with.

The best course of action was to just cut through the middle of the rows and rows of shelves and boxes. After he was at the other end he'd make the left turn and see what was up with the camera.

He had just turned the corner when the blast of cold air hit him. Weird, it was the final week of June. Sure the basement, as you would expect, was chilly. But this was different. This was the kind of cold that went right through to the core of a person. The kind that makes you think you may never be warm again. Something was off.

This train of thought was interrupted by a sob. That was when Billy Wood saw her, the source.

The little girl could only have been nine or ten. She was a scrawny thing, with long dark hair and sunken, grey eyes. She hadn't seemed to have noticed him as she knelt, crying in her black tattered dress.

Billy Wood, did what any person would do. He got a little bit pissed. "Hey! Little girl! What on earth are you doing down here?"

The crying stopped. The girl raised her head. She tilted her head at him, not quite sure what to make of the burly, old man. She spoke in a voice just above a whisper. "I'm _scared_."

Billy Wood was a father of two. No matter how old his girls got, the paternal instinct never went away. So he crouched down to her level and extended a hand to her. "Well, come on, sweetheart. It's gonna be alright. There's nothing to be scared of, there's just me."

But the girl wasn't looking at him now, her eyes were fixed on something right behind him. She sniffed. "It's not you who we have to be scared of."

Billy followed her gaze, already knowing that it wasn't going to be good.

The woman was slightly shorter than him. But the dark aura that seemed to surround her, and the lack of life in any part of her told him that this was not a force to be reckoned with. The red tangles of her hair reached her shoulders. A bright beam of light glinted off the knife in her hand.

"I'm sorry." The little girl shook her head. "I'm so sorry."

The words barely registered in Billy's mind. His attention was more directed towards the psycho bitch with the knife. Something told him reasoning with her was out of the question. And he was unarmed and had a bad hip, he couldn't take her. Running was the only option. That's when his mind went back to the girl.

"Kid, we've gotta-" The girl was gone. The father in him knew that he should go look for her. But the more realistic part of him knew that if he was making a run for it, it had to be now. He turned back around. The woman was getting closer now. Oh God, this couldn't be it, this couldn't be happening. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't move. So this was what pure terror felt like.

The woman grinned.

And then, he didn't feel anything at all.

* * *

Ellie Robinson had trained herself not to scream when she woke up. Shooting up and struggling to get herself at a regular number heartbeat a per minute was something that was still a work in progress.

She looked down to her side. Fortunately, she hadn't woken Henry up. She read the alarm-clock on the bedside table. 4:12am. She groaned. No way in hell could she get back to sleep. With the most grace she could manage, which wasn't a lot, she quietly got out of the bed. Bare feet softly making their way across the bedroom floor, she opened the closet. Careful not to wake Henry, she took out her running stuff and quickly swapped them for her pajamas.

Her keys were by the door, you only forget to bring the keys to your apartment on a run in the middle of the night once. Obviously, no-one else was hallways of the apartment building, well except for Mr. Simmons who worked night-shifts at the 24hr supermarket uptown. She waved politely, their crossing paths as they tried to not wake their fellow neighbours was a regular thing between them now.

Ellie really wished that this was unique occurrence, but unfortunately, that wasn't the case. The dreams happened a lot. And the reason why she referred to them as dreams, not nightmares - only to herself of course, she obviously wasn't going to be telling anyone about them - was because sometimes they weren't as morbid as tonight's dream. Sometime they were really mundane, like seriously, really boring. There was the one where she and her friend April skipped class in 11th grade to go sunbathing by Stark's Pond, which resulted in a sunburn she had to explain to her grandparents, obviously, they were pissed. That was one of the few that she remembered. Normally by this point in the jog she'd would forget what had freaked her out so much in the first place, as was the case that night. Which is actually a pretty common thing, you normally forget a dream not long after waking up. I'm not sure the exact amount of time, but you could probably google if you were that interested to find out.

And so she ran. Sure saying she 'was running away from her problems' was a bit cliche, but hey, if the shoe fits.

Besides, there were worse places to live than Salem, Massachusetts. Sure all those poor innocent women died there, but what state has a perfect history? And the trials were 300 years ago, America has done worse things since then. Seriously, so much worse.

The neighbourhood they lived in was nice enough. I mean, nobody's ever got stabbed, well not recently anyway. And it was only twenty minutes away from Grangewood Manor, where she worked, so that was convenient.

She would home by five o'clock but too strung up to go back to sleep straight away. So she'd doodle. Her definition of doodling being putting what could be considered too much effort into drawing some guy in an old, worn-out trucker hat. Why she decided to give herself the agony of trying to draw facial hair she would never quite understand. You just have to suffer for your art, I suppose.

Henry would find her a few hours later sprawled out on the couch, running shoes still on, out for the count. He would chuckle to himself about the awkward positioning of her limbs and the tiny little dribble of drool running down her cheek. He would take the knitted quilt off the back of the couch, he thinks Ellie's grandmother gave it to them as a moving in present, and cover her with it.

He went by the assumption that these nightly outings had be going on long before they knew each-other. They had met in college, he was completely hammered, she humoured him.

He would kiss her forehead and brush a stray strand of hair out of her face. He'd let her sleep for another hour before she'd definitely need to get ready for work. And then he'd make himself a coffee, take a shower and get dressed. By then she'd be up and complaining about her sore neck. He'd make a wisecrack, she'd call him a douchecanoe. Then he'd say something in Spanish and then of course she'd have to return the favour. After their five minutes of flirting in a foreign language, she'd kiss him once, twice, three times before she really was going to be late to work. With a great theatricality she'd tell him that she would have to love him and leave him before agreeing that he'd make dinner that night.

They'd kiss one last time, she'd grab her umbrella because she wouldn't like the look of those clouds and be out the door.

Now I could leave you with a cheesy-ass line about how everything in Ellie Robinson's world was about to change. But that's cliche as fuck so I'll tell you this instead. You never know when life is going to turn around and punch you in the throat, but them's the works, kids. But if Ellie Robinson had known how bad things were going to go tits up, she sure as hell would never have gone in to work that day.


End file.
